Anjali Arondekar

For the record : on sexuality and the colonial archive in India

Preface ix Introduction. Without a Trace 1 1. A Secret Report: Richard Burtons Colonial Anthropology 27 2. Subject to Sodomy: The Case of Colonial India 67 3. Archival Attachments: The Story of an India-Rubber Dildo 97 4. In the Wake of 1857: Rudyard Kiplings Mutiny Papers 131 Coda. Passing Returns 171 Bibliography 181 Index 205

Border/Line Sex

This article foregrounds the current critical emphasis on the language of intersectionality and analogy between race and sexuality, especially with respect to the discourse of rights and discrimination. Such language uses ‘racism’ and ‘race’ as stable registers of oppression, whereby a range of discriminatory practices based on sexual orientation gather representational and judicial validity through their linkage and similarity to such registers. Buried in such ‘linkages’ is the very mathematical paradox of parallelism that forecloses any true intersection, even as it invites lines of common origin and travel. Hence, we are often left with a language of analogy and repetition where race as sex and sex as race become parallel political formations only through a constant reminder of their irreconcilable separation. Instead, I theorize the productive possibility of a Spivakian ‘transactional reading’ whereby the linking of sex and race becomes a dynamic dilation of difference, even as it speaks the language of similarity and kinship. Some of the questions I raise are: Are such analogical invocations of sexuality also about new forms of racisms and imperialisms? Given the rise of queer transnational work, how do we translate the analytical paradigm of ‘race’ outside of its formations in the United States? In order to answer these questions and more, I turn to contemporary mobilizations of the race/sex nexus, especially post the events of 9/11. I focus, in particular, on the successful emergence of queer ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ groups such as Al-Fatiha post 9/11, and situate their success within a critique of American mobilizations of religion, race and sexuality.

Time’s Corpus

At stake here is a dialogue between two minoritized historiographies—one in South Asian studies and the other in queer-sexuality studies—and their shared preoccupation with the responsibility of historical emergence and recognition. To attempt such a dialogue, this chapter moves away from the conventional (and often reactionary) segregation of the two field formations as oppositional or discrete. Central to the argument is an understanding of area studies as constitutive of the histories of sexuality and vice versa.1 My goal is not merely to narrate the analytical convergences between the two field formations; rather I am interested more in what I will call the “comparative imaginaries” that animate such a conversation. By “comparative imaginaries,” I mean to gesture to the incursions of temporality, to the “politics of time” that emerge in our desire for knowledge and in our ethical stances toward otherness.2

Queering Archives A Roundtable Discussion

© 2015 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion” provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the fields future development. As a broad conversation about the career of the queer archival, as both intellectual project and political practice, this discussion focuses on developments and limits within North American queer studies of the archive, which emerges as a central object of analysis and is itself somewhat archived within the terms of the discussion. The roundtable discussion provides a sustained critical engagement with the profile of the queer archive as a site for radical struggles over historical knowledge, offering a renewed sense of the queer archive as a pertinent site for scholarship and politics across an array of orientations and tendencies.